User Experience Analysis and User Interface Design Improvement for Academic Search Engine

Abstract

Scientific articles searching is a crucial activity for final year undergraduate students, since they have to conduct a final year project. Nowadays, we can do scientific articles searching by accessing available general search engines or search engines specific for scientific article domain. In this paper, we present a User Experience (UX) study of an existing scientific article search engine and propose an improved design based on users feedback. The respondents of this study are 30 final year undergraduate students majoring in computer science. The UX study on the existing scientific article search engine using System Usability Scale (SUS) score revealed that the website need improvement, given the low SUS score, 24. We improved the website design by implementing User Centered Design approach, and the SUS score increase to 80.6.